Joseph Conrad’s book Heart of Darkness was influenced by the Battle of Omdurman. ibid.
A new era in the history of racism. Europeans started mistaking military superiority for intellectual and even biological superiority. That’s when things turned nasty. No-one had to pretend any more. ibid.
Baden-Powell writes to his mother: ‘I thoroughly enjoyed the outing. Except for want of a fight. Which I fear will preclude our getting any medals or decoration’. ibid.
Lord Salisbury, Albert Hall 4th May 1898: ‘One can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying. The weak nations become increasingly weaker and the strong, stronger. It was in the nature of things that the living nations would fraudulently encroach on the territory of the dying.’ ibid.
The Germans did not think that as a higher race they had any need to abide by treaties they made with the natives. As in north America, the German plans for immigration presupposed that the natives were to be relieved of all land of any value. When the Hereros resisted … every Herero found within the German borders with or without weapons was to be shot … 80,000 Hereros died in the desert. ibid.
Eugenics: The over-infatuation with genetic impurity, an impressive amount of energy put into the classification of people. A pathological obsession for the concept of race that scientifically doesn’t exist. ibid.
The Myth of Pristine Wilderness: a land with no people does not exist. The idea that America was virgin land, a wilderness inhabited by non-people called savages, is a myth. Only through killing and displacement does it become uninhabited. Before the arrival of the British, north America was a continent of villages, of nations, of confederations of nations. Exterminate All the Brutes IV: The Bright Colours of Fascism
The Navy Seal team members who carried out the assassination of Osama bin Laden on May 2nd 2011 were reporting in real time to President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other officials in the sealed Situation Room. Following the operation, the New York Daily News commented, ‘Along with the unseen pictures of Osama bin Laden’s corpse and questions about what Pakistan knew, Intelligence Officials’ reasons for dubbing the Al Qaeda boss ‘Geronimo’ remain one of the biggest mysteries of the Black Ops mission.’ ibid.
Kill anything that moves. Take no prisoners. In California, hunting Indians was both legal and profitable. $5 a head, 50 cents a scalp. In 1849 the American government paid more than a million dollars to Indian hunters. ibid.
Make America Great again, he said. When exactly was it great? I mean really great? And for whom? ibid.
In the beginning, the slaves had to clean the cotton with their bare hands. The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney would change everything. But Cotton also destroyed the soil, while using slaves’ bodies like a commodity became the most lucrative enterprise around. More profitable than all lands, banks, railroads, factories and gold products put together. Slaves were used as collateral for mortgage, a newly developed tool of commerce. ibid.
By 1890, disarmed, held in concentration camps, their children taken away half starved, the Lakota and Dakota survivors found a new resistance: ghost dancing. ibid.
Wounded Knee Massacre: East Indians killed: 300; Survivors: 51 (4 men, 47 women), Army casualties: 25 dead. ibid.
1918: Over one-million British women now work in factories making bombs and bullets. The British VII: War and Peace, Sky Atlantic 2012
‘Our faces took on a strange yellow hue ... We were called canaries’. ibid. diary of women munitions worker
Munitions Factory: 134 killed in the blast; 250 are injured. Of the dead, only 32 can be positively identified. ibid.
Let us not forget the bankers who financed the Great War, who turned blood into gold. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, Youtube 1.34.05. 2024
When we stumbled on the Saudi arms deal, the al-Yamamah arms deal, we really started to stumble on a central feature of British politics over the last thirty years. ibid. David Leigh, journalist
They [Saudis] wanted £43 billion’ worth of weaponry. That was £6 billion in commissions. ibid. Andrew Feinstein
Arms firm’s £60m slush fund: Police launch investigation into allegations of gifts and payments to Saudis. ibid. Guardian front page
There’s evidence that Mark Thatcher, Mrs Thatcher’s son, got £12 million in cash for his work as a fixer. ibid.
Politics is dictated by the whims of the arms industry. ibid. man in the know
BAE had set up a whole system, with Lloyds Bank, under which they channelled secret payments into the British Virgin Islands. ibid. Feinstein
Profits from illegal arms deals to Iran were diverted by US officials to the Nicaraguan ‘Contras’ to overthrow their democratically elected government. ibid. caption
The National Security League today is mostly composed of people who hit the revolving door multiple times. ibid. Lawrence Wilkerson
A network of corporations that have the fire power of small nation-states. ibid. Feinstein
Many of these arms deals had been forced through by Tony Blair personally … The spectre of a British prime minister closing down a criminal investigation for his own reasons. ibid. Leigh
The heads of government are the salespeople-in-chief of their country’s large arms contractors. ibid.
How can you come out of Gaza and not be angry? How can you come out of the Sudan … ibid. Chris Hedges
It’s like Americans are living in this kind of fantasy world that bears no relation to planet Earth where I’m trying to report. ibid. Robert Fisk